Life: Alec Muffett quotes an Economist opening line:
Category: Uncategorized
Security: Hey user auth systems! If you’re going to require me to sign in, and publish my login as a signature to prove that I’m ‘me’, please do me a favour — don’t delete the account if it’s been ‘inactive’, and allow anyone to re-register that name without my knowledge!
Mapping: NASA’s Earth Observatory has put up a 4 MB high-res topographical image of Ireland. A rough calculation indicates that each pixel is under 0.1 of a mile on a side. It’s fantastic. ;)
Web: I’ve been doing a little thinking about group-based networking and services.
Patents: DCC (Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse) is a venerable, and widely-used anti-spam system created by Vernon Schryver; we’ve supported it in SpamAssassin for yonks.
Web: Now this is very cool stuff: ‘Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any webpage to change it’s behavior.’
Tax: Following on from the previous entry, I’ve had a stroke of luck. It turns out that I did indeed quality as a US resident for tax purposes, and therefore could use Turbotax.
Taxes: it’s that time of year again, when every inhabitant of the US, resident and ‘non-resident’, gets The Fear. Yep, it’s tax time. (Warning: this is a long and protracted vent.)
Misc: So I was travelling last week — a very productive trip to the UK visiting the main work dev office, and getting a little socialising in too while I was at it. A pretty good trip overall, especially since I seem to have figured out how to use my frequent flyer miles effectively to get great seats! ;)
Patents: So the Conference of Presidents has ratified the JURI decision to throw out the flawed software patents directive text. Phew! That’s a lot more pressure on the European Commission. Charlie McCreevy could still carry on his attempt to steamroller European democracy on this one, but it looks likely that he wouldn’t get away with it now — possibly facing sanctions as a result.
Tech: Bit of a long essay, this one.
Spam: recently, I’ve been getting a lot of spam bounces; that is, messages sent by people’s autoresponders, in response to forged spam claiming to come from my domain. (I have an SPF record, but these autoresponders naturally don’t bother to check that before replying.)
Spam: Should ISPs Be Profiting From Knowingly Hosting Spam Gangs? — a new article up on Spamhaus.org, well worth a read. Some snippets:
Antarctic: It seems that Ernest Shackleton, during his exploration of Antarctica, relied heavily on ‘Forced March’ tablets:
Patents: FFII are reporting that ‘the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (JURI) has decided with a large majority to ask the Commission for a renewed referral of the software patents directive. With only two or three votes against and one abstention, the resolution had overwhelming support from the committee, and all-party backing.’
Networking: Donal Cunningham, president of SAGE-IE, mails to note an interesting talk on in Dublin next week:
Tech: January 24th, besides being the date the first Apple Macintosh went on sale, is supposedly the day of maximal post-xmas misery. Well, it certainly was for me today.
Spam: Before xmas, I received a copy of Brian McWilliams‘ new book, Spam Kings.
Blogs: Just to expand on a linkblog
posting I made yesterday, Google’s search team have announced support
for a new piece of Google functionality; they’ll fix their crawlers to
ignore links with a rel="nofollow" attribute, for PageRank
calculations, the idea being that spammers will stop blog-spamming
once they can’t get PageRank out of it.
Spam: I was just looking back through the archives here on taint.org, and noticed this entry from December 2 last year:
Spam: eWeek recently published an article entitled ‘Spammers’ New Tactic Upends DNS’ , which notes that:
Code: Here’s something I came up with recently — it’s actually
an evolution of the idea of pushd and popd, as included
in BASH.
To quote the POD docs:
Politics: This moronic comic from Pat Oliphant came up in my comics page the other day, and, after a few days of hearing this particular talking point through the usual propaganda channels, I just saw it again. It pissed me off enough that I took a look at the stats.
Web: Urgh, I still have this damn cold I picked up in Ireland… sniffle cough etc. More vitamin C needed!
Patents: here’s an interesting technique I heard recently. (credit: I’m not sure who told me about it, but I think it may have come from or via John Levine.)
Spam: I’m still catching up, but this is just plain hilarious. Pure, solid-gold, insanity. Verizon.net, the ISP branch of the US telco, has decided that the easiest way to fix their spam problems (uh, spam-receiving problems, that is), is now blocking inbound email from non-U.S. IP ranges:
Linux: after about 3 months of tweaking and twisting, performed by someone who’s been using UNIX for over a decade, I’ve finally got sound working the way I want it on my Linux desktop. In other words, I can hear sounds made by Flash applets, and I don’t have to shut down the best music player on the platform every time another app wants to make a sound.
Spam: The Business Software Alliance, a UK anti-piracy body representing many of the major software vendors, recently issued a spam-related press release which got a lot of attention in the UK press (they have great press contacts!).
Patents: This is really absurd — according to this ZDNet UK article, it now looks like the EU Council is considering railroading the EU software patent directive through, by hiding it as an ‘A-item’ in a Fisheries Council Meeting the week before xmas:
RFID Scan Detector
RFID: Over on Adam Shostack’s weblog, in a comment on an entry regarding the plans to mandate remotely-readable RFID passports, Martin Forssen brings up a great idea: